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I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give AFuck Anymore ROCK ACTION

Still bracingly sour: Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat

8/10 Scottish duo’s second post-reunion album offers rich ruminations on midlife angst and online rage. By Stephen Dalton

DEEP into asecond-act comeback that began in 2016, Falkirk’s poet laureates of sweary filth are now 50-yearold family men and prolific, prize-winning, kelpie-sized fixtures on the Scottish cultural landscape. Indeed, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton are in danger of becoming national treasures, albeit national treasures who write hilariously bleak confessionals about outsized cocks, sordid carnal obsessions, apocalyptic hangovers, degrading online porn and the inevitable decay that consumes all human flesh. Thankfully, middle age has not mellowed the duo too much, just lent an extra world-weary wisdom to Moffat’s selflacerating, brutally honest lyrics and Middleton’s increasingly rich, eclectic compositions.

It may be flippantly titled after atext sent by the duo’s live drummer, but I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give AFuck Any More is aserious and complex album, with lyrics that dig deep into toxic masculinity and the unkindness of strangers. Billed as an angrier record than As Days Get Dark from 2021, it is certainly not short on inflammatory subject matter. Akey target of Moffat’s rage here is the horrorshow of online discourse, particularly the misogynistic trolls and hate-driven edgelords who lurk in the digital darklands.

This rich theme kicks off the album with “Allatonceness”, ahairy-knuckled beast of atune full of clobbering drums and burly, snarly guitar. Here Moffat slips easily into visceral disgust mode, railing against the groomers, grifters and entitled fanboys who have all “done their own research” while “Nazis and rapists sell merch”. The sting in this grim fairy tale comes when Moffat’s semi-autobiographical narrator reveals that he too is addicted to this online gladiatorial shitshow, aslave to the algorithm, just like millions of us.

The bristling, percussive funk-rock belter “Sociometer Blues” casts acaustic eye on our love-hate relationship with social media, imagined here in sentient terms as asoul-sucking emotional vampire: “You take all my time, you take all my strength, you steal my love/You are the worst friend I ever had”. Meanwhile, internet demons of adifferent sort haunt the album’s ironically upbeat lead-off single “Bliss”, whose female protagonist is bullied online by ashadow army of “cowards under camouflage”. Agleaming, rave-adjacent, electro-pop banger with the dark heart of aserial killer, this is Arab Strap at their most nuanced and novelistic.

Another key lyrical theme here is the post-Covid emotional landscape, with Moffat musing ambiguously on lost connections, faded friendships and the grim obligation of renewed social contact. Over asoundbed of grumbling electro-folk, delicate piano flourishes and pointedly ignored voicemail messages, the lugubrious narrator of “Summer Season” hankers wistfully for the enforced solitude of the pandemic: “Sun is shining, let’s pretend/My lockdown didn’t end”. Shifting from tragicomic to purely tragic, “Safe &Well” is afinger-picking acoustic ballad narrated by aghost. The heart-tugging lyric was inspired by the real case of awoman who died alone during the pandemic, her body rotting away for months, forgotten by friends and family.